


Cheating the Universe

by ihaveacleverfandomurl



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, I don't know what to tag this with, M/M, Neil dies but he keeps coming back to life, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, andrew is a stalker, lots of descriptions of his deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-14 13:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16493906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihaveacleverfandomurl/pseuds/ihaveacleverfandomurl
Summary: The first time Nathaniel dies it’s an accident. He wakes up in the front seat of his family’s old scratched up Honda Accord that isn’t scratched up anymore – it’s bent around a tree.The glass shattered across his dash, dusted over his seat, glittering on his arms and legs, is smeared with blood. A lot of blood. There’s the shape of a forehead in the decimated windshield.By all accounts, Nathaniel should be smashed to pieces just like the vehicle.By all accounts, except for his working body, Nathanielwassmashed to pieces.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> tw: gross morbid things happen, but this has nothing on AFTG  
> there's probably a lot I should warn for... idk there's a lot of gory death descriptions, mention of child abuse & there's also a suicide attempt?? apologies if i fucked up n forgot anything

The first time Nathaniel dies it’s an accident. He wakes up in the front seat of his family’s old scratched up Honda Accord that isn’t scratched up anymore – it’s bent around a tree.

The glass shattered across his dash, dusted over his seat, glittering on his arms and legs, is smeared with blood. A lot of blood. There’s the shape of a forehead in the decimated windshield.

By all accounts, Nathaniel should be smashed to pieces just like the vehicle.

By all accounts, except for his working body, Nathaniel _was_ smashed to pieces.

But the blood isn’t from anything. He has no wounds, no cuts, no broken bones. His skin, when he examines what he can see, is unmarred. Hell, he doesn’t even feel like he has whiplash.

He crawls out of the window, discards his bloodied jacket, and walks home. His phone isn’t working. It’s beyond the ability to function like the rest of everything in that car. He has to explain to his mother why he’s pale and shaking, why the car is gone from the driveway and why his phone has disappeared. Considering he hasn’t actually gotten his driver’s license yet, he isn’t supposed to be driving the car, and he seemingly escaped death by some otherworldly hand, he could have done worse, but not by much. He lies, badly, something about how he just taken the car out with a friend and they’d been at a party (true, though before that night, he’d never have told her that) and someone had stolen everything out of his pockets.

She makes him feel like he might have actually been in that car crash.

She always knew how to hit hard.

Police find the car. Nathaniel knows they’ll be coming to his house, asking questions. Knows his mother won’t like whatever answers he gives. And her hitting hard will be the least of his worries then.

It takes a whole lot of guts he never thought he had to run. Takes Nathaniel forcing himself to think of his mother calling her ex husband, Nathaniel’s father, making himself think of Nathan Wesninski hearing even a shred of a rumor that Nathaniel has done something, to leave. Because while Mary is scary, his father is terrifying.

Nathaniel leaves with a backpack full of what useful things he can swipe and pretty basic, pretty illegal, and pretty stupid ideas to get away and get his own approximation of a life.

Later, in a library a good many bus rides, a couple hitchhikes, and a train away, he checks the news about his crash, maybe about his disappearance. Somehow, his vanishing barely seems to be noticed at all: a little note at the bottom of a column unrelated to the crash. His family name somehow doesn’t even make it into the news. Local reporters are more interested in fussing and questioning how a corpse could have walked away from a wreck that bad.

Nathaniel presses his fingers to his chest each night of sleeping in dark hiding places on the streets, under what little temporary shelter he can find, shivering and cold, straining to hear a steady thumping, feel it beat against his fingers,  and wonders the same.

* * *

The second time Nathaniel dies, he’s an unfortunate person in the wrong place at the wrong time. States away from his old home, a month into living in this particular city.

It’s also the moment the shit hits the fan, although he won’t know that until much, much, much later.

It must have been about a year since his crash. He’s convinced himself to forget about it. It was some crazy miracle, but it isn’t going to happen again. Besides, he’s gotten himself a job that hasn’t asked too many questions, found places to sleep – even if they’re rarely, if ever, permanent solutions.

He isn’t rich, but he’s making enough to start saving. He’s walking through the streets of the city that night, hood up, hands in hoodie pockets, ready to get to his version of home, when the man grabs him. It’s dark, hitting later hours, which was why Nathaniel had been in such a hurry. He wonders later if maybe, maybe if he had just taken his time, lingered a little longer at the 24 hour diner, ordered another plate of greasy, cheap fries, he could have avoided it.

But regrets are for people who die.

Nathaniel sees a flickering light on a billboard advertising window cleaning flash once, twice, and the man’s rough voice demands all his money as he falls, slamming to the ground.

“I don’t have anything,” Nathaniel tries to say, pulling his hands out to hold up, but he doesn’t get that far. The man’s spooked face and behind his head, in the distance, the sparkling pane of glass and teeth of the window cleaner up on the billboard are the last things Nathaniel sees in that lifetime. The light illuminating the billboard fizzles out and the gun pointed at his chest fires.

* * *

He has scars and weird side effects from his deaths. He doesn’t get off scot free. The car crash had given him one, under his hair. He’d never noticed it until he’d opened his eyes to a lightening sky framed by cityscape waking up and sat up to feel at a brand new ridge in the center of his chest. He gets up and leaves the alleyway and pretends everything is normal because he feels like somebody is watching him. Later he reexamines his body in front of a mirror like it’s foreign to him, and discover the rough tissue he hadn’t ever taken the care to feel on his scalp. He leaves the city that night, skin crawling and irrational fear that people would know if he stayed, would figure out what happened.

The third time, he’s halfway across the country and it leaves a burn on his face, down the side of his torso, where the flames licked his right arm and left angry red welts that fade to a soft pink. He can still call it an accident, because _technically_ it was, but also, he’s getting tired of “accidents.” A burning building isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, but when you’ve already been in a car crash and shot in the chest, getting trapped in one collapsing on top of him, watching his skin melt off his bones? Just plain unlucky. It takes waking up to hear firemen moving around the remains of the burned out husk of a building to shimmy between blackened beams and run for the hills once more. He thinks he’s cursed, thinks maybe the universe is trying to fix what it fucked up in letting him live. The chances of getting stuck in so many death-defying situations is statistically improbable.

He thinks.

He failed statistics.

He gets hit by lightning and he’s pretty damn sure his statistics teacher would be going nuts by now. The electricity trails feathery purple veins down his back like tree branches. They don’t disappear. He continues cheating the universe at its own game.

He drowns swimming in a pool and the lifeguard is at a loss when he gets up after CPR failed four times (though after, sometimes his lungs don’t seem to work quite right), he gets crushed by a falling tree (there’s the imprint of bark across his ribs), somebody lets him take too much of a weird drug that makes waking up in the ambulance that has lost hope for his heart restarting strange (he gets dizzy every once in awhile), he falls out of a window and snaps his neck (there’s weird red scars on the back of it that makes him think maybe bones poked through the skin). He moves each time, keeps saving, until he realizes that if he can settle down, a little, just enough to establish something, maybe he can have an actual life.

So getting into a college isn’t what he expects to be doing after an honest-to-god couple of months in a single place – so far from the place he once called home that he’s almost forgotten the place he lived before that crash – without even so much as a whisper of death passing by him. But it’s what happens. And he’s trying to get some kind of degree, something that might land him a job that pays more than just a little, and fuck, maybe he’s settling in a little too much, but he’s been doing this for...for a good number of years now. And he’s tired, and complacent, but it’s always there, death hovering behind him, ready to tap on his shoulder once more.

Number nine has him sitting on his bed late one night, overwhelmed with homework and work and trying not to put down roots when maybe after all these years all he’s wanted has been to sink into the ground somewhere. It’s too late to be sane – but what part of his life _is_ sane? – so his head is spinning a little, wondering if maybe the only way to end this constant torture is by ending it himself, and he tries, with his suite mate’s stolen pocket knife, cutting up his arm, and the blood flows, and flows, and flows, and he passes out and wakes up in sticky sheets, and the scar is rippling its way up his arm, an innocent white strip, healed up as if he’d done it years instead of hours ago.

Nathaniel returns the pocket knife and doesn’t try again. But he also doesn’t leave.

The tenth time is different, though. In ways that Nathaniel has never been prepared for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so here's the deets uhhh i've never written for foxhole court in my life even though I've owed my soul to it for a while now? I first started writing this fic forever ago and I was super inspired for a month and then I lost it and never touched it again... I have a chapter and a half written so  
> Should I tell writer's block to shove it and try to finish this? or will it be another "falls by the wayside, unread & unloved" fic??  
> Is this fandom even alive??? idk u tell me my dudes  
> (basically i will probably only continue if people really want me to so pLEASE do let me know if u do want that lol)  
> (EDIT 2/28: changed chapter one "Neil"s to "Nathaniel"s because it actually makes sense @ past me...also...I'm gonna try to get back on workin on chapter three ;))


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp y'all asked for it ;)))  
> rereading this after a good many months i'm sweatin and nervous over my andrew bc honestly no one can write andrew like nora does but here we are,,,tryin

Neil Josten sits at a table in the cheapest campus coffee shop, tapping his finger against plastic tabletop and willing words to appear on his laptop screen despite the fact that he isn’t actually touching a single key. He hates English. He can’t even remember the title of the book he’s “dissecting” right now.

He feels a prickle at the base of his skull, eyes are on him. That’s not uncommon. He hides most of the damage of his deaths with clothes and hair, but the uneven flesh of his cheek is visible and not worth trying to hide. Makeup doesn’t do shit, he’s tried once or twice. People still stare, rudely and unapologetically.

He turns his attention to the eyes in particular this time. A pair of brown ones, in the face of a blond haired man sprawled across a couch in the corner. Neil expects revulsion, or morbid curiosity, maybe pity to be bleeding across his face. It’s what he finds in every observing stranger’s expression – at least a hint of it, somewhere, no matter how they try to hide it. They wouldn’t stare at him otherwise.

But he doesn’t expect...whatever the hell this is. The intensity is almost terrifying. It kind of is, because Neil can’t make out the reason behind it.

The stranger’s face is turned directly to him. A notebook rests slackly in a hand, closed, a pencil dangling from the other. The notebook looks worn, bits of different papers sticking out of its pages, obviously something that is well-loved, but the man is very, very apparently paying no attention to it, instead focusing every ounce on Neil.

Neil shifts, returns the stare once more, and goes back to his screen, chewing on the inside of his cheek. If the guy has something to say, he can come over and brazenly say it to Neil’s face.

“Stuart.”

He’s standing behind Neil quicker than Neil expected, and he startles at the cold voice in his ear, twisting in shock.

He finds his voice after a minute. “No, Neil.”

The man presses the eraser end of his pencil into his mouth, the slightest hint of a smirk turning up one end. His gaze is just as intense, staring directly into Neil’s eyes without a flicker of shame, even at this distance. Neil feels uncomfortable. “ _Professor_ Stuart.”

Oh. Oh, yes, that was his English professor’s name, wasn’t it. “Yes.”

“He’s a hardass.”

“Yeah. Do you need something?”

The man’s eyes glitter. “You need help, don’t you, Neil?”

Neil barely bites back “not from you” and turns back to his paper. Nosy weirdos are the last thing a person with his...condition needs. Angering one will only lead to trouble. Neil lives his life with his head down, and now isn’t the time to start a fight over a single creepy interaction. “No thanks.”

“I’d bet you’re two papers away from failing. I know all his tricks. Last year I aced his class.”

Neil gives him one last look. He’s going to focus now, and maybe the guy will go away. “Good for you.”

The laugh is a single, hard exhale, and Neil shivers at the breath on his neck. He resists the impulse to reach back and check that #8’s scar is still properly covered by auburn hair and not under this guy’s scrutiny.

“When you get back that paper with a shitty grade, maybe you’ll get off your high horse and come back down to the ground with the rest of us, Neil.” The paper is slid across the tabletop to rest next to Neil’s computer and the man leaves.

When Neil finally looks up, the man’s completely gone. Neil looks back down to the slip of paper and finds a phone number and no name. It’s written in a firm, sharp hand on thin, weirdly textured paper that’s a bit crinkled and worn – just like the guy’s notebook – torn off from the corner of a newspaper, it seems, if the paper itself and the edges of printed letters are anything to go by.

Neil shoves the paper into the bottom of his backpack where he leaves crumpled up receipts and other trash and goes back to his paper.

* * *

He gets an F and a couple dozen red marks. Stuart’s pen marks the margins every other line with angry comments about how Neil barely seems to even comprehend his first language and some of the exchange students learning English for the first time are doing better than him.

At the bottom, Stuart notes that Neil will end up with an F for the class should his next paper go half as terribly as this one.

Neil fumes as he stomps back to his dorm, slamming his suite door behind him, not caring when one of his suitemates, Kevin Day, looks up to glare through black bangs. Neil glares right back at Kevin and yanks at his hair, pacing.

If he fails English, his GPA is fucked. Neil does okay in other subjects, but he’s not great. He likes track, and he’s decent enough and has sucked up enough to his various math teachers and professors over the years to get pretty good grades there. But it doesn’t matter what he ends up finally deciding to major in, nothing can bring him up from this.

“What the fuck, Neil? You’re being weirder than usual.” Kevin asks it, but he turns his attention back to the TV, where he’s watching a rival football match. He doesn’t really care.

Neil usually doesn’t really care either, but today, he’s pissed off. “My fucking English professor has it fucking out for me. I’m going to _flunk out_ , Kevin.”

“Maybe somebody I actually care about will take your room,” Kevin drones, turning up the volume. Neil grabs the remote and turns the TV off. Kevin sends him a rude gesture.

“This is serious. I need this degree, you bastard.”

“Yeah, your family won’t pay you a cent, they don’t care, blah, blah.” Kevin elbows him in the stomach and yanks the remote back.

Neil rubs his stomach. They’re both athletes, but Kevin is a true jock, with actually visible muscle mass through his shirt. Neil has his own definition, but he’s more lean than bulky, and his resistance to dying doesn’t make him impervious to pain from Kevin’s sharp elbows. “I’ll punch you.”

“You can try.”

“Get a tutor, Neil!” is the helpful yell of Matt Boyd down the hall through his door, and Neil freezes, mind flashing, unbidden, to the scrap of paper still stuffed in his bag underneath textbooks that have proved to be useless.

He shouldn’t. He can’t.

* * *

_Neil: what do you want?_

_Creep from coffeeshop: My my my could this be Neil crawling back with his tail between his legs?_

_Neil: what’s the catch?_

_Creep from coffeeshop: No catch_

_Creep from coffeeshop: just come to my room tomorrow night anytime after 6. I’ll see what I can do_

He lives two buildings over, and at six thirty the next night, Neil paces in front of it, trying to pluck up the courage to unlock the main door and step inside.

What’s the worst that could happen, really? The creep killing Neil?

Neil snorts and shoves his key into the lock.

Yeah. Nothing to be afraid of.

* * *

When he knocks on the door and somebody else opens it, Neil is stuck. The guy is tall (although most people are taller than him) and has slightly curly dark hair with freckles that blend with his brown skin. He eyes Neil up and down with apparent interest, raising an eyebrow.

“Did Christmas come early? I accept you as a present.”

He tugs Neil into the room, who is suddenly even more dry mouthed. “I came to see –”

But he doesn’t know who he came to see. He never got the guy’s name.

Thankfully, he spots a blond head just barely peeking over the back of the couch, playing a video game.

“Hey,” he says, and the guy turns. His eyes hold none of what they had yesterday, in fact, Neil doesn’t even think they carry a spark of recognition. Neil pauses, confused.

“Are you here for _Andrew_ ? Did he somehow make a _friend_?” The guy who’d opened the door bounces on his feet. “Shit, where’s he getting hot friends from, I want a share.”

A door down the hall opens and it’s the guy from the coffee shop, but the one on the couch looks just like him.

“Ah!” The guy is back to staring, a bit of a grin twisting his mouth. “You’ve met the worst of us, I see.”

“I’m Nicky, hot stuff. That’s Aaron, and you know Andrew, somehow.” The door guy sticks out his hand, and Neil tentatively shakes it. He’s in over his head, here. He can do openly antagonistic at a distance, he does that every day with Kevin, and Seth Gordon, their other suitemate. He can do whatever Matt and him have going – something like an almost friendship, just about as close as Neil is with anyone. And he hates stranger stares, but he’s used to them, he can deal with that too.

He doesn’t know these people, doesn’t know this dynamic of quiet Aaron and flirty (?) Nicky and the smirking unreadable face of this guy who’s apparently called Andrew who says he has no expectations, no catch to his help, but he’s looking at Neil kind of like he wants to eat him.

“Maybe you should let go of him,” Andrew says, and Neil realizes his hand is still clasped in Nicky’s.

“He’s not all yours!”

“Hands off,” says Andrew through teeth bared too wide.

Nicky lets go, Aaron looks up, and Neil stares. Andrew merely blinks at Neil and turns around, clearly expecting him to follow as he vanishes back into his room. When Neil looks around, Nicky and Aaron both look a little shell-shocked. Neil swallows and tags after his weird, weird tutor.

When he enters the room, hesitantly closing the door behind him, it’s remarkably bare and dark – the blinds are closed and Andrew hasn't really decorated. No pictures line the walls, no school flags or posters hang on the ceiling. The bed is a plain mattress and a gray blanket, a single pillow. The desk that Andrew’s leaning against holds simply a computer and a stack of books – Neil can pick out from spines that they’re only textbooks and notebooks.

Neil wonders if Andrew works full time at being a creep and doesn’t have time for other ventures like having a life.

“So, Neil, how’d you get those scars, huh?”

Neil, who’s been in the process of shucking off his backpack to pull out his schoolwork, freezes.

“You think you’d actually introduce yourself before inviting yourself into someone’s personal business,” he finally says.

“Well, I’ve never been polite. And you know my name, Neil. Nicky was kind enough to tell you that.”

Neil snorts and folds his arms, pulling his backpack against his stomach again and regarding Andrew once more. Sizing him up.

“I fell in a campfire,” he says shortly.

“Oh, the fire cut your arm?”

People don’t ask about that. They shouldn’t ask about that. That scar hasn’t been around for long, but it’s clearly made by someone not looking to live.

“I got in an accident.”

“A car accident?”

There’s little light in the room, but Andrew’s eyes seem to gleam. Neil feels a chill.

“Yeah.”

“The one on the back of your neck?”

He’d seen it. How had he seen it?

“I, uh, same. It was from the car accident.”

“Huh.” Andrew sounds comically wondering, like he’s hearing a punchline Neil isn’t. His gaze doesn’t flicker. “What else?”

“What do you mean what else?”

“I know there’s more than that.” He’s pushing off the desk and stepping closer, and Neil steps back, and even though Andrew is shorter than him (a feat indeed) Neil feels very, very scared suddenly.

His back bumps the wall, and Andrew’s grin is feral. “At the very least, Neil. What – about – this.”

He twirls his finger in the air with each word before it comes to rest in the center of Neil’s chest, and firmly, very clearly, without a doubt, on Neil’s very hidden, very secret bullet scar. Death #2.

It’s not entirely deaths #4 and #6 that seize his lungs and has his body begin to play with the idea of just...quitting and passing out. They contribute, but the finger pressing into scar tissue feels like it carries the weight of a train.

Number ten is no accident. Nor is it Neil attempting the impossible.

He doesn’t see the knife until it’s out and in Andrew’s hand, being driven into his upper arm. He yells and tries to yank away when he does, though, panting through damaged airways and seeing red.

Andrew has pinned him, however, with a strong forearm wrapped by a black band, eyes wide and smile somehow still present. “So you can feel pain. Interesting.”

He yanks the knife out and Neil goes limp, letting out a whimper that morphs into another scream as Andrew slams it back into his arm.

“Wow. What about here?”

The knife at his neck has Neil completely still, tense and shaking. It’s slicing skin, the sting of an extra-sharp blade and the sticky warmth of a cut forming, but it hasn’t sunk in yet. Andrew hasn’t slit his throat.

“P-please,” Neil mumbles. His face is wet with pained tears, and Andrew narrows his eyes.

“You can’t die. I know. What’s wrong with you?”

“Please don’t.”

“It won’t kill you,” Andrew says. “Will it? Tell me I’m wrong.”

He can’t.

“Do it, then.”

Andrew’s knife presses down, and after a while of choking on his own blood, Neil is gone again, to be reborn once more with his newest scar: a slice across his Adam’s apple in the shape of Andrew’s blade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here's where the currently written content stops! Y'all were real kind n let me know you were interested in this so I'll work on more! fyi I am working on other fics at the moment that probs will take precedent...but thank u very much for the love!! tbh i just need more plot to this fic than i currently have lol  
> (also..,,,if u like my writing...u can check those other fics out btw ;) i don't have any more aftg but if you're into voltron i've got it in spades)

**Author's Note:**

> if you wanna be a sweetheart and support me and this fic in a completely free way you can [reblog this post right here](https://kayizcray.tumblr.com/post/179675958373/cheating-the-universe)! Or share this trash with your friends! My dudes any form of spreading my work to others is the best fuckin thing lemme tell ya  
> -  
> comments are my lifeblood ( ˘ ³˘)♥  
> -  
> [my creative tumblr](http://kayizcray.tumblr.com) | [my personal tumblr](http://ihaveacleverfandomurl.tumblr.com/) | ([& my cosplay instagram](https://www.instagram.com/kayizcray/) with some very occasional aftg cosplay on it)  
> 


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